A Human Touch

‘CURIOUS’ BRINGS THE HIGH SCIENCE OF JPL AND CALTECH DOWN TO EARTH

In a scene from a new public television series called
“CURIOUS,” a mobile robot maneuvers around in dirt terrain and drives into a
bale of hay. Andrew Howard, engineer and physicist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, watches the rover he programmed and how it responds to the
obstacles in its path, trying to learn how to best teach the machines
“decision-making.”

“It’s very easy to put yourself in the head of the robot.
‘Why is it doing that? I think it’s doing this,’” he says. “And you also get
cranky. When it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing, you say, ‘Why are
you doing that?’ You talk to the robot and say, ‘Clearly you shouldn’t be doing
that. I taught you that was the wrong thing to do.’”

After a pause, Howard says, “OK. Now I sound like a parent,”
and laughs.

“CURIOUS” producer, director and writer Mark Mannucci and
co-producer Tara Thomas were surprised that the stories they discovered at
Caltech and JPL were “incredibly human.”

“One of the things that amused us was how many times these
NASA scientists at JPL would talk about how ‘he does this’ or ‘she does that’
and I’d say, ‘You mean your robot?’” Mannucci said. “It was funny to see them
get attached to their creations, as if they were working with people instead of
machines. It was charming.”

When Mannucci and Thomas set out to create a science show
for Thirteen/WNET New York that was both educational and entertaining, they
realized the key was good old-fashioned storytelling. Mannucci had never worked
on a science show before and had no preconceived ideas about what one should be
like, so he decided to let the scientists tell their own stories, without the
assistance of narration.

“[The scientists] tell you what they did, they tell you how
they felt,” Mannucci said.

The result is a down-to-earth and emotionally engaging
science program, sometimes dramatic, and with plenty of opportunities to smile
and laugh. The researchers’ goals, passions, questions, emotions — and
those of some of the people who are part of the studies — bring the
stories to life.

“We found these great human stories,” said Thomas, who
worked with Mannucci throughout the year of filming. “[The scientists] do what
they do to help people ultimately.”

“CURIOUS,” which airs on KCET from 9 to 11 p.m. next
Thursday, Nov. 15, focuses on cutting-edge research at Caltech and JPL: an
alternative fuel source and an experimental chemotherapy drug in the first
part, “Survival”; and neuroeconomics, our social brain, the aerodynamics of
fruit flies

and robotics in the second part, “Mind/Brain/Machine.”

Mark Davis’ dramatic story struck the filmmakers as a
perfect example of how personal science can be and how directly it can impact our
lives. Davis’ story begins as he’s driving on the Foothill (210) Freeway east
to City of Hope in Duarte. He’s talking about the restless night he had and the
“cautious nervousness” he’s feeling. A professor of chemical engineering at
Caltech, Davis never would have predicted he’d devise an alternative to
chemotherapy and witness its first use in a cancer patient after 10 years of
lab studies.

Ray Natha is anxious for another reason. His pancreatic
cancer has spread to his lungs and is no longer responding to chemotherapy.
He’s been given a few months to live. Davis’ experimental drug, IT 101, is his
only hope. “It’s exceedingly rare to be a faculty member at a university and to
be sitting there chatting with the first patient,” Davis says in the show. “It’s
really personal now. It’s just not a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper.”

Davis’ wife Mary tells us there is a love story behind IT
101. After suffering with side effects from her own aggressive chemotherapy for
breast cancer, she asked her husband to help. “There’s got to be a better way,”
she said.

The filmmakers followed Davis and Natha through six months
of infusions and were at City of Hope when everyone learned that the
nanoparticle Davis created stopped further tumor growth and then started killing
Natha’s tumors. Natha and his wife shed tears at the good news and the
prognosis of a longer life.

“How often do you get to follow a story like that? That’s
amazing to see someone get the first drop of this drug,” Mannucci said.
“Everyone was nervous because we were not sure what was going to happen. It was
very emotionally intense,” Thomas said. “It was incredible.”

To “cast” the series and determine themes for each episode,
Mannucci and Thomas talked to about 50 scientists via one-and-a-half-hour conference
calls with video hookup from their offices at WNET. Then Mannucci had to learn
as much as he could about the research they chose to focus on for his
interviews and filming that would take place over a year. “It’s like I went
back to school,” he said.

Since the scientists’ words became the script, part of the
challenge was making sure the dialogue was conversational rather than
technical, something they found was actually more challenging with the graduate
students than with the professors.

“The main thing was learning as much as we could and helping
them be clear, linear, chronological and entertaining. ‘No, you’re not writing
a paper. You don’t need to use a word with that many syllables,’” Mannucci
said, playfully recalling his “direction” of the cast.

Music, creative filming techniques and a wide assortment

of graphics from an animation company called Asterisk, all
combine on the television side of the equation and add to the clarity and
entertainment value. Sossina Haile, one of the Caltech scientists working on a
way to use sunlight and water to create hydrogen fuel, laughs as she explains a
catalyst in terms of your mom waking you up for school. You were going to do it
anyway, but the catalyst makes it happen sooner, she says, as animation makes
the idea visual.

His only philosophy for “CURIOUS” was: “Let’s find some
really good stories and make some really good television. As long as I felt
wowed by what we were seeing,

I felt pretty good that we could turn that around and convey

that excitement.” Mannucci and Thomas hope people will come
away from the series aware of the life-changing research going on

at Caltech and JPL and maybe even surprised by how fascinating
it is.

“Who’d have thought flies were so interesting?” Mannucci
asked. “Who’d have thought you could be mesmerized by the way a fly takes off?
I haven’t really felt good about killing a fly since then; I mean I’d feel like
I’m killing 300,000 finely engineered neurons.”